[Image: postcard, “The Big Shot” (the Big Room, Carlsbad Caverns, NM). For more information, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response — anger — then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance. It’s not that anger is repressed; anger never arises in the first place.

(Andrew Olendzki)

…and (regarding February 29):

Today is an ephemeral ghost. A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not exist.

In mundane terms, it marks a leap in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up.

But this day holds another secret — it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razors edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability.